


Reeds on the River

by dismalzelenka



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Passive Suicidality, Post ME3, Sad AU Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-02 23:21:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16314614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dismalzelenka/pseuds/dismalzelenka
Summary: Creepy text from the last movement of Franz Schubert'sWinterreise. Hypothetical scenarios where Shepard slowly loses her mind. A brief study on staring into the abyss, and then jumping in.





	Reeds on the River

**Author's Note:**

> …and he lets it all go by, everything as it will,  
> He plays and his hurdy-gurdy is never still.  
> Strange old man, shall I go with you?  
> Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?  
> \- Wilhelm Müller, “Der Leiermann”

Sleep was becoming an increasingly rare commodity lately. Tessa sat up suddenly and drew the blanket tightly around her shoulders, the rough wool fabric scratching uncomfortably at her bare skin over her sleeveless undershirt. Something had jolted her awake, but a cursory scan of her surroundings revealed nothing out of the ordinary. She could feel her heartbeat racing, a deafening sound in her ears against the silence.    
  
The night air carried a sharp and biting chill. Outside, reedy native grasses rustled an eerie symphony as a light breeze rustled the filmy grey curtains through a crack in the window, moonlight filtering through various moth-eaten holes and casting ghoulish shadows across the pale stone floor. She could hear Kaidan's rhythmic snoring from the other bunk across the room, and for a moment she felt a twinge of jealousy at how he still managed to sleep relatively undisturbed most of the time.    
  
Her own feeble attempts to make it through an entire night were growing increasingly unsuccessful as of late. Lately, she considered herself lucky if she made it more than three hours before waking up in a cold sweat, the aftereffects of some dream she could never remember, one that only ever left behind a splitting headache and a sickening sense of dread churning in her stomach.    
  
She let the blanket fall from her shoulders and stepped out of bed, the floor like a sheet of ice against her bare feet as she quietly unlocked the door to the cramped single-room prefab hut they currently shared and slipped outside. Three moons and a vast expanse of stars twinkled at her from an extraordinarily clear canvas of Catalina blue. This nightscape was a few shades lighter than the midnights she remembered from her cell window in Vancouver; this particular shade was closer to the hue of the rich Mindoir night skies from her childhood.    
  
This entire area reminded her of her childhood home, from the thick patches of tall, lavender colored reeds that clustered around a nearby riverbank to the same distinct and heavy scent of pine that wafted through the clearing with every breeze. She wasn't one to normally dwell on old memories, especially particularly emotional memories, but tonight, the familiar surroundings were leaving a lump in her throat and a tight feeling in her chest.    
  
If she had to put a label to what she was feeling, she supposed it was something akin to homesickness, although the specific definition of "home", for her, was a particularly elusive one. She missed the bustle of port cities, the lights and the noise that lent a certain sense of life to the atmosphere at all hours of the day and night. Here, it was too quiet. There had been many a moment throughout her career when she wanted nothing more than a dark, noiseless room where she could force down a few cups of stale coffee and gather her thoughts without someone interrupting her with yet another problem, but she would have taken three times as many of those disruptions over the sort of oppressive silence she faced here daily.    
  
She wandered to the river, as she had every night for the past two weeks, her steps leaving light footprints in the bank as the silt squished like velvet between her toes. There had to be half a dozen or more safety regulations she was unceremoniously stomping over, leaving her quarters half dressed, pants rolled up haphazardly to her shins, with neither weapon on her belt nor shoes on her feet. But in these midnight sojourns, regulations and personal safety were the last things on her mind.    
  
The one thing she had always hoped throughout her career was that she would eventually learn how to effectively handle the aftermaths of the inevitably disastrous situations her job brought with it. Now, after over fifteen years of service, two personal encounters with death, and arguably the biggest war in galactic history under her belt, she was slowly resigning herself to the possibility that maybe - despite all of the counseling and spiritual soul searching everyone advocated so heavily - maybe it was just something no one ever really figured out. What if the skill people in her position actually acquired was one of cardinal deception? Was it possible she had been seeing mere projections of them this entire time while their experiences slowly dissolved them away on the inside behind remarkably unwavering shells of success and competence? It was a disturbing thought, albeit an uncomfortably common one these days. She stirred the river's surface with her toes. Sometimes, she felt as though the constancy of the icy water around her ankles every night was the only thing left holding her sanity together.     
  
She studied her reflection in the water, her features rippling ethereally with the current. The stars above her, twinkling their likenesses on the rocks below, painted a ghostly visage that stared back at her ominously, hundreds of lustrous eyes watching her intently with an accusatory gaze. It was oddly paradoxical; every night, she came here to clear the knot of dread in her stomach, yet the scrutiny of the faces she saw in the water always filled her with an uneasy sense of foreboding. For some reason, though, night after night they inevitably drew her back, a bizarre sort of twisted comfort in their macabre familiarity.    
  
Two weeks, she had been coming here to the river, and every night it grew harder and harder to leave. She realized distantly that she was shivering from the cold, although for how long she couldn’t really say; she was only peripherally aware of the numbness in her fingers and the prickling of gooseflesh  along her arms, the hardness of the river rocks a barely registered pressure against submerged feet that had long since lost feeling. Turning back toward their tiny compound, she eyed the tiny, modular buildings with a sense of hesitant reluctance she didn’t quite understand. Part of her was keenly feeling the full weight of her chronic sleep deprivation and wanted nothing more than to crawl back under a stack of blankets and close her aching eyes; but the ebb and flow of rippling waters whispered their hushed pleadings with feverish desperation, a compelling song against the otherwise painful stillness.    
  
The damp soil of the riverbank saturated the fabric of her trousers as she sank to the ground, legs drawn to her chest, her heartbeat a pale drumbeat against her knees. It wasn’t so cold in this position, she thought impassively as she watched the grass swaying, the motion mirrored in the river’s surface in mesmerizing ripples of black and purple. In fact, she was now aware of a comfortable warmth spreading through her limbs and torso, as though someone had draped a blanket over her without her noticing. Tessa rubbed her fingers together and glanced back at the compound again.    
  
_ You're freezing to death _ , a voice in her head said.    
  
_ Stay a little longer, _ something else pleaded.    
  
She would return eventually, she decided, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to linger a little more.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic instead of paying attention and taking notes during a German Song Literature lecture back in 2015 when I was working on my music degree. Side note: German art song is some truly wild shit, y'all. 
> 
> (I ended up singing some movements from _Winterreise_ in my second undergrad voice recital, and the movement this fic is based on was probably my favorite out of all of them.)


End file.
